Satire’s Ecology

This chapter argues that formal techniques associated with satirical humor, including irony, exaggeration, and sarcasm, allow for a disruptive engagement that can orient us into violence, contingency, and potential in relationships between humans, other elements, and other beings. I begin with a reading of Erewhon (1872), where Samuel Butler deploys satire to position settler-capitalist approaches to humans and elements such as water as both unacceptable and avoidable. Moving from Erewhon to a reading of New Zealand poet David Eggleton’ s “Driverless Ute” (2010), I consider the difficulty of facing satire’s fiery structural critiques and imaginaries of potential in this time of climate change, attachment to energy-intensive modern forms of life, and of futures involving the inevitable continuation of ecological upheaval.